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Show 27 starvation. His encounters with all sorts of dangerous species, from the Spanish bayonette to the microbes which caused malarial fevers and typhoid, led Muir to believe that the natural inhabitants of the earth did not necessarily comfort a pilgrim seeking the warm breast of Nature. And so he learned in concrete detail what he had suspected before, that the world was not necessarily made for men. "Why," he began to ask himself, "should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?" Indeed he_ had ample evidence that he_ was not suited to the tropics, but knew that it was not to be blamed on Nature. Just as a man might invent a doctrine which blamed Eve for death, so too, "when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates." A man might blame the "first mother," or consider his difficulty "a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of sin." Only his monumental ego-centrism, his anthropocentrism, made him believe that his own death at the hands of the elements was important. In fact, Man was simply not a necessary member of the biological community in such places. He passed away there because he never belonged in the first place. Muir was beginning to acquire a biocentric outlook. And when he did begin to suspect that civilized man had a totally misconceived notion of his own exalted position in Nature, Muir ran up against his education. I have mentioned |